In one of the most poignant vox pops I ever did, I wasn’t even looking for Neets, AKA young people who aren’t in education, employment or training. I was just looking for people on the streets near Liverpool with enough time to speak to me. I ran into a young man who had dropped out of university, and he explained why: he’d been doing a business studies degree, and had realised during his second term that a degree didn’t make sound business sense. Everything he was learning, he could have found in a book, and the nine grand of annual fees was only a fraction of the total debt he was incurring. He went on to tell me quite a lot about upfront cost and hidden cost, and ratios and leverage, but the bottom line was that it didn’t represent value for money.
So he left, but that gave him three problems: first, he still had a load of debt, just nothing to show for it; second, he had nothing to do; third, a lot of the value of a degree cannot be counted – you only begin to comprehend it by its absence.
As A-level results loom this week, I constantly have my beak in teenagers’ business. Friends of my kids, work-experience students I’ve known and loved: I can’t stop myself asking them all the standard questions – what university they want to go to, what their offer is, what their predictions are, how their exams went. The emotional rhythms are irresistible: you strive for a thing, you get close to the thing, conditionally, you strive harder and you hopefully hit the jackpot. Even if I were to engage my critical brain, and think: “How much additional earning potential will an English and history degree from Exeter deliver?”, I don’t believe in that as a metric. I’m not willing to surrender to a normal in which the only point of reading and thinking is converting them into a definable employment status. At the same time, I’m not going to be the one paying for that idealism – they are. So I carry on contributing to the social fantasy that student debt is an inevitability and a solid investment, just to avoid dealing with the world as it is.
That guilt and vague foreboding must be even worse for teachers. No wonder they’re so into apprenticeships.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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